7
Apple, the Learning Company
7.1. The chasm
You know your core business. You know what you know and you also know what you do not know (which perhaps you should not know either). Your experience guides you. Enough knowledge is enough: concentrating on what you do best is always your safest net for the future.
Do the dynamics of success make companies fall asleep after a while? After the start-up phase, it is said that growth must happen to succeed and reap the benefits of initial investments. Success in one domain attracts success, but the downside of it is that you tend to confine yourself to the same narrow domain, again and again. Does a looming fate of being successful blind us again to the hidden learning needed to perform?
7.1.1. Business school
The traditional school of thought is to put emphasis on how to avoid making any mistakes and failures. This conservative attitude lends to risk aversion, at all levels of management.
Which attitudes tend to develop a company culture hostile to innovations, especially disruptive ones?
7.1.2. Apple
“I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly.”
Peter Cook
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Steve Jobs
In the Apple way of managing a company, the company keeps the agility of a start up, whatever its size. So, you can still reinvent yourself.
Think (and do) something different.
Start-up genes are peculiar: focused on rebirth. Those of grown-ups are even more focused on steady-state governance: they fossilize little by little irrevocably. Where is the biggest gain? The gain is not only quantitative, but it is also qualitative.
Break the syllogism:
- success attracts success;
- you already succeed at something;
- therefore, do more of that something.
For example, Kodak Digital Corp. (successful minis were found sitting in between two big segments attacking them), and perhaps, Microsoft’s Windows and Office to some extent.
Detach yourself from the present conditions, because your customers are tied in and cannot extract themselves.
Be bold (and wise) enough to escape from the routine of success rut, and think about something else. The best time is “the moment you begin to feel some perceivable comfort". Get out of the rut then: it is a looming basket of pitfall.
Microsoft dwelled in Windows and Office ruts for a long time, despite the huge returns from its dominant market share. A 2015 Windows 10 subsumes an invisible Windows 9, so to mark exiting the rut and send the corresponding marketing message.
Be a highly innovative company, prepared to take huge bets and risks. Accept failure as part of company culture. For every lesson that can be learned from failures, take into account its messages for the future. Sometimes, this will be many years later, and under a totally different approach. What failure tells us is that it is a bitter golden nugget you have paid for and others have possibly not. It is all yours, ready for transmutation into successes.
7.2. Amplifying the gap and progressing
“I’ll be back.”
The Terminator (1984)
Did Apple give up the computer market after the Lisa failure? Obviously not.
Did Apple give up on the market of keyboardless mobile equipment, or after the Newton failure? Obviously, not: the iPad, with its touch screen, can be considered as a distant follow-up of the Newton, even though (probably based on Newton’s return of experience), the stylus was summarily dismissed by Jobs as a suitable input device, until a new technology for a professional graphics device (the iPad Pro) could come of age in 2015. Apple subsequently rehabilited and repositioned the stylus as a precision designer’s pen.
Did Apple give up on the camera market, after the QuickTake failure? Obviously not, but the camera functionality is now considered as an integral part of other products, smartphones or tablets.
Did Apple give up on the video game market, after the Pippin failure? For the time being, yes.
Did Apple give up on the TV market, after the failure of the Macintosh TV? Obviously not, the Apple TV is there.
Did Apple give up on the market of the high-end professional computer after the G Cube failure? Obviously not, the Mac Pro is now there that strangely resembles a former product.
Many other examples could have been given, these are the most significant. Indeed, Apple may encounter failure (even though the G Cube in this list is the only Apple 2.0 product, launched after Steve Jobs returned to stewardship). With the exception of the video game market so far, Apple managed in every case to make such a comeback – successful comeback that the initial failure has been totally wiped out and resigned oblivion.
However, in each of the cases, the comeback took many years to happen, all the lessons from the previous failure had been learned. And the new offering is totally different from its failed predecessor.
Perseverance is not stubbornness.
As said, the only exception in this failure list is the video game market. Could it be that Apple size is now such that this market makes it negligible for Apple? Or, perhaps, that the notion of a specialized video game device may be just a temporary remnant of the past?
In the TV case, the Apple TV is an unusually modest move, presented as a “hobby". But, it may well be that this is just the beginning, as the story is not over.
Very often, the main obstacle to improvement is the incapacity of the leaders to recognize that they made a mistake. Leaders do not reach the top level of a large company without a strong feeling of their superiority. This not only has some positive aspects, in the sense that the person is immune to any doubts, but also negative aspects, because such a psychological profile is not typically prone to selfcriticism.
Experience shows that companies internally developing a strong feeling of superiority are in great danger, because that feeling is both a cause and an early sign of possible coming decline. Everybody has examples in mind.
Furthermore, it is very hard for a leader to recognize a failure for which he bears no responsibility.
Few high level leaders remain humble enough to apologize in public, and accept personal responsibility for failures. Tim Cook did so at the occasion of the troublesome Plans application launch. This tells us a lot about Apple’s DNA.